now i am so pleased to introduce

tonight's speakers jonathan metzl is frederick b rentschler, the second professor of sociology and psychiatry and the director of medicine and society at the vanderbilt. the award winning author dying of whiteness how the politics of racial resentment is killing america's heartlands and other books. he hails from kansas city, missouri and lives in nashville, tennessee he is joined in conversation tonight by beth simone noveck professor at northeastern university and director of the burn center for social. jonathan metzl is presenting his new book, what we've living and dying in a country of arms and

what we've become. metzl reckons both with long history of distrust of public health, larger forces, social ideological, historical, racial and, political that allow mass shootings occur on a nearly daily basis. america. looking closely at the cycle in which matt's mass shootings lead to shock horror calls for action and ultimately political gridlock, he explores what happened to the soul of a nation and the meaning of safety community. when we normalize violence, an acceptable tradeoff for freedom. in the words of michael eric dyson, i know a few other thinkers who so consistently what ails america. this is the clarion call to everyone possesses who professes concern about the state of guns in this country. if we stand a chance in hell, we're fighting back and remaking america in the image of gun safety. we need this book now. we're so pleased that it's this event here at harvard tonight. please join me in. welcoming jonathan metzl and batsmen noveck.

thank you so much. thank you for having us. first, let me wish you congratulations not on the book, but on the super bowl. yeah. yeah. this is an important event. kansas city from city. that's an it's an important day for you, but also on the book. obviously it has gotten astounding, as you heard not only from dyson, but the new york times named it a staff pick and editors choice was a phenomenal review today in the globe, kirkus reviews hailed it as a powerful, convincing effort to reframe the discussion around gun control and its discontents. so i want to just start off by asking to set the stage for us really how you came to write this book and really start with this story. hundred million guns in this country. you framed this around this 2018 waffle house shooting, which obviously happened in your backyard. but i'm wondering if you could just start us off by explaining to us why you chose this of all

the sadly mass and individual shootings, why you framed this book around this story and how it came to be? well, first, thank you. it is such an honor to be here for so many reasons. it's just it's great to be part of this great ongoing conversation about a that i'm telling, but that we're all part of in this country, which is like what the hell do we do honestly? and not like i am like, oh, i studied this and this is what we do. it's more like, i'd like to raise some about how we got here. so we can figure out a better way forward. and it's been a very humbling experience for me because the process of this book has led me to talk with a lot of families of who lost children from mass shootings, communities that are traumatized, but also a lot of gun owners who feel misunderstood and they're kind of different notions of safety. so it's been a really intense, really intense five years. i'm so grateful to naughton for

publishing this book. honestly, it's a risk to publish books about guns right now because everybody thinks they are on one side or the other and trying say, hey, wait, there's a middle ground where we can converse is is a risk and. so i'm grateful for that. and also just thank you to beth, who has been my friend, colleague and collaborator, i'm affiliated with the burn center and. i've been kind of part of the amazing that's happening right here in boston around civic engagement, which which is such an honor now. that being said, i didn't think i was going to write another gun book. i'll just start with a personal part of this, which is my last book, dying of whiteness, was about a lot of things, but it was a lot about gun suicide in missouri. i spent a long time living in cape girardeau, missouri, in the south of missouri, among families who had lost relatives, children, very often to gun suicide. that book was intense and

exhausting, and i like it just felt like this was the story that was story i wanted to tell about guns in a way. and i was ready to go on to like, i don't know, i would joke with my like a book about puppies, you know, or ponies, or something like that. like, i'm not a downer but maybe i. and it was just that there was this moment in 2018, i'm kind of finishing dying of. and there's this moment when you live in a city in the united states or a town or a neighborhood. i mean, it's almost inescapable. that said, we have more mass shootings, calendar days. but, you know, there's the people who are at the scene of the crime. there are the families who are affected. but then there's the community story, which is that you're sitting at work and you hear all the sirens and then you hear all the helicopters or you're at home as. i was on on the night that this happened and you're like, man, that's a lot of sirens and they're going away from you and then they're coming back toward

you because. you live near the trauma center at vanderbilt hospital. and so there is something, first of all, that's really intense when it happens in your community and. i think that's part of it for me was the intensity of seeing it happen, seeing that trauma happen in my community was different from studying guns and other places. i think that the first level for me, but then the second part was, you know there's breaking news and this has not this has happened a number of times now. nashville, where the covenant school shooting last year, other shootings, there was one at a middle school, the other this shooting 2018. and you hear there's a there's a shooting, the waffle in the waffle house in, south nashville. and if you live in you know, that's not the cowboy boots and country bars part of town that is the black and brown part of town. that's where there are black communities and latino

communities and kurdish communities. and so you think like, well, gosh, that's really intense. there must be a mass shooting in the in the south part of town and then the news breaks that the victims were all young adults color and there were incredible. we'll talk about it a little. but a young rapper who was well known, a basketball star who was well known, like the names of the victims to come out and they were truly truly rising stars in our in our community. and then you hear that the shooter, a naked white man with r 15 and i don't know i'm somebody who has studied race and mental illness and and gun violence and. i just thought, how can i not like this story? how can i not be at least part of the person who tells story? now, this story has been told in our community and again by the families who keep the stories alive by, the friends of the

victims, just our community. but there is something that happens where, as you're suggesting, mass shootings happen so often that they kind of blend. i mean, that's kind of the i call it what we've become. we've become a a country that perpetuates this kind of trauma in order to go on with the next day and i wanted to slow down the story and say what happens when we tell one story? what do we learn? and especially for me, a story about race and about mental illness. and really, that's the center of this story is so many unexpected twists and turns that we're just not where i thought it was going. and every time i thought, well, this will just be a good new yorker article, but then some other crazy thing would happen, you know something? i totally didn't. and so it just kind kept going and it just became for this bigger parable, not so much about all mass shootings, but just about our country and, you

know, i'll just the last thing i'll say about that is the normal story. you turn on fox news or something is like, you know, we need guns because there's a shooting in the subway or gang or carjackers. but this was the inversion of that story, this was white guns coming to kill black bodies. and for me, there was such a powerful such a powerful lesson in that also about how became kind of an embodiment this this naked white shooter for me became an embodiment. i mean, he was a pathology himself and he was an embodiment of our cultural choices and values to be honest. and so it just became like a much bigger project than i was expecting and led me into the story and then much broader. and it is such a multi-layered story that you tell here about race about values, about politics. and apropos of new yorker article, this is such a gorgeously book, i have to say,

and especially you bring out the voices of, the victims and the families so poignantly. so i do hope we will talk a little bit more about that. but i want to talk for a moment about the perpetrator and this naked travis ranking, who goes in and shoots up the waffle house, maybe as a way into this story little bit, because travis was not unknown to the police, to the fbi. he had been stopped. he was a known quantity. he had a youtube channel where he's sleeping with his air 15 in a rather erotically charged way. as you explain something else that you get into so, i just want you to maybe tell us a little more, get into the story a little by telling us how is it that somebody who had so many guns was known to the police, who was a known how did how did we allow this to happen? it was not out of the you make

very, very clear and it's one of the beautiful pieces of writing in the book is how you really follow us through the many, many incidents that lead to this shooting, which frankly never should happened. so maybe you could just get to it a little bit, the story of travis and how we got here and why wasn't he stopped at any point. yeah i mean so thank it's so there are this is just the way my mind works there are multiple stories happening at one time in this book there's the story of the gun which i think we're going to talk about next. and i kind of track the story of how the gun got to the waffle house and how the story of the man got to the waffle house. now it wasn't the most obvious way to tell the story. and in fact, in in literature that i respect from field it's like we're not going to say the name of the shooter we're not going to glorify the shooter. and i, i don't know just felt like i actually had to tell the story of the shooter because i feel like telling the story of

this white and this ar 15 is just i didn't i wanted it to be exposed. and, you know, that's kind of like obvious because his body was so exposed. but wanted. i couldn't tell the story of this white body without telling the story of him. so i mentioned his name, talk about him. but part of the story when you when you see and also the other part is to be honest i'm not i'm not convinced that not telling his name would another shooting. i mean, i've no evidence that. but anyway, we can talk about that later. but the issue is when you track the story of how he got there and how the gun got there he buys gun legally in illinois like pretty much every other shooter i mean so many mass shooters buy their guns legally. and it kind of you know, when i talk to conservative gun owners are like but we have because of the illegal gun market and i'm like yeah and so but he buys gun

legally and living in a conservative part of illinois morton illinois and while he's in his of illinois he has a number of psycho freakish episodes that also guns he's he's picked up at the cvs parking lot by police and the ambulance and his parents come they take him to a psych hospital for like 5 minutes. and then he later jumps into a public pool. that's full of people on a summer day. and got a semiautomatic weapon in the back of his truck. he pulls out the weapon and points it at an employee of his father's. a number of incidents. this to the point where he goes to the white house and he's hearing he wants to talk to trump, who is like his, you know, scion of titan he's like, i have to talk to trump. i have to ask trump. he tries to jump the fence. he has an fbi file.

and after every one of these things, they say this guy probably shouldn't have guns guns, but they give the guns back to the parents or to him every single time. now, part of why that is, as i argue in the book, is of race that if i have a kind of alternate alter character, black travis ranking who goes through the book black chivers drinking makes it through the first event because. a black man is not going to get five chances, but a white man looks like the kind of guy whose rights be protected. and that's kind of the again, they trust the father who's business owner, so they keep giving guns back and even after the fbi, he his guns are confiscated, but they give him to the dad to lock up and they say, now, don't give him back. don't give him back. and what ultimately happens is he there in illinois? and ranking figures out that if

goes to tennessee, tennessee doesn't have tight gun laws and so the laws prohibiting him having the guns in illinois won't pass in tennessee. so he's like, dad, if i go to tennessee, i can carry these legally. and the dad's like, you know, you're right. and he gives the guns back and he goes to tennessee. so the crappy gun laws in tennessee become a beacon for. him and as beth was mentioning, i have a lot of home videos of the shooter these guns have very profound erotic meanings for him and so have them taken away is is catastrophic for him psychologically and tennessee it's like these loose gun laws restore restore him that's kind of his feeling and so in a way we always think like loose gun laws they're bad because of shootings and stuff like that. but they were also they're also like, i, i just always think of the siren of titan. this erotic song that's calling people like this to feel their manhood like it was. i'm not. i've tried to move away from

psychoanalysis in my career, but it was hard to in this case. and so part of the story is just the story of how it gets there has to do with whiteness, mental illness and the draw loose gun laws that that really beckon him in this powerful way before. we get to the laws, though. i want to maybe just to complicate our edibles story. the father is concerned. the father takes the guns and yet gives them back to him. the father is supposed to watch the guns and yet gives him access to them, especially with the conviction of jennifer crumbly. this week in michigan. i'm just wondering how you view role of the parents in this and i don't want to jump ahead to all of our policy solutions here, but do you think his father should have been held liable? do you think jennifer crumley should be held liable? what is the role of the parents in this situation? well, in this case, the father was found culpable. he's actually prison right now

for 18 months for giving the giving the guns back. and and i the crumley case is another where you don't get a warning from the school and take your kid to the target practice the next day encourage them with the guns so i do think parental culpability is another layer of responsibility. the system that we can build in. but if i but do i think that these are going to lead to any systemic change? i truly don't, unfortunately and the reason i say that is because that the ranking case is illinois, a blue state. the crumley case isn't a concern ever to part of a blue state. but but a case like that never be filed in nashville in tennessee. it wouldn't be filed in a red state. i don't think. i mean, if it if that happens, you know, it's an issue. but i think so. i do think that the i mean, the premise behind a red law is that

people who close to somebody know know when that person's to go off the way that a police person won't but that are two problems with that as i see it. well many many problems with it. in this case he the guy was he was over 18. so something like this wouldn't have really mattered except that there was this legal issue. so again, the father was liable. he shouldn't have given the guns back. but i would just say like i talk a lot about, you know, the idea, the mental health story of a mass shooter is that one day he just snapped, you know, the kind of like dog day afternoon story or the whatever, like the, you know, just that was the day he couldn't take any more or that one story with them. michael douglas where he got out of his car and traffic in los angeles. but actually in reality, as talk about psychiatrists are really judges of when is going to shoot somebody else in part because

well first there's no mental illness that shooting somebody else is a symptom of that illness. so there's nothing there's no tool. but the other thing is most a mass shooters if we're just in the realm of mass shooter, it's characterological. they've been this way for a long time. and so it's more about their personal ality than it is about a snap psychotic episode. and so if psychiatrists really are not good at out like what's the one day and holding liable has led to catastrophic implications like a psychiatrist ended up in new york when they passed the safe act there 400,000 put people put on the list because psychiatrists every single person, they had no idea who was going to go, who was going to be violent. so surveilled everybody because they're like, oh, my god, i'm responsible. and i think it would be the thing with parents. i think about a character logically, personality damage, people who have been this way for a long time. what's the one day that they're going to?

you know, i think guns and parents is, another whole issue. but it's not like it's not like, oh, this is the one day he got out of bed and he's going do this. usually, if people are smart enough to pull one of these off, they're hiding it from the people to them. so i don't know what i'm worried that it would lead to the same implications it does kind of with psychiatrists, which is oh my god, you're liable. therefore your kids never you're never going to go out of the house. here's the thing. so i want start to shift a little bit. and again, the the the beautiful nature of this book is you tell this incredible individual story, this family story, the stories of the victims. but then you pan and give us the broader sociology, typical narrative, the political narrative here. and i think even more shock than the reaction of the individual police in that cvs parking or the father who gives them back the guns is what happens after this in tennessee the fact that you have this horrific shooting and not the only one and yet the reaction politically is not to go out and elect the gun control candidate not, even to elect the

centrist candidate, to elect the candidate for to the right. bill lee, and then reelect him, who then goes out and passes proposes and successfully passes legislation to eliminate and background checks. so this utterly counter intuitive and i think from where we're sitting in cambridge, massachusetts, perhaps we'll talk about that divide it's particularly hard understand so i just want you to help explain to us this reaction how is it possible for that to have been the reaction to this horror mythic and senseless shooting. there are two parts of this really key part of the story. one has to do with public health. and we'll talk about that next. maybe like why? i don't think why? why? i don't think public health is the right framework for cases like i mean, the i the controversy, one of the controversies around this book

is is to talk about the effectiveness of public health in this framework. but also links to race. now, let me just repeat better said, there's a mass shooting in tennessee in 2018 that traumatizes i mean, we're all out in the streets. we're saying this is a time for change kind of similar to what we had after covenant. it's time for background checks. it's time for red flag laws. it's really time change. it was really powerful and if a lot the you know, this was white guns coming to a black community and killing black young adults and latino young adults. and so the politics this it just felt like a moment for like 5 minutes as often we do after mass shootings, it felt like were going to change and then not only did they not change, but in in my perspective got worse they actually worse and why do i say that? because we rallied. we protest and it was powerful

like people on the defensive, politicians were saying maybe now the time that we should pass background checks like were very apologetic for the first week and then it was kind of like that star wars, you know, where the empire back it was. like the empire started to strike back and what happened they control all the committees, all judges, all the stuff that was immune popular opinion and that popular opinion in many other parts of the state and so this played out and i think a few important ways in the narrative. one is that there's a gubernatorial election, right, like four months after the shooting and because we had just the waffle house shooting, five of the candidates probably were saying we need tighter gun laws, gun guns are, a public health epidemic, it's time that we treat guns the way we treat or cigarets.

so five of the candidates who were like, well, democratic or or middle of the road republicans were saying, we will do, you know. we're going to do the right thing here, which is it's time for some common sense regulation, just the way we've seen like car wrecks go down, anti-lock brakes and second hand smoke go down and one candidate and an unknown business guy said these guns are, a sign of your freedom and your power. it's not the government's job to regulate them. if you elect me, you can your guns and you can keep your power. and this was bill lee who went in an absolute landslide. and so even after seeing the effects of this shooting and seeing the protests in the streets, seeing all this stuff, the guy who went out there and spoke story to white america for the most part, which is guns represent power and your power should not be infringed. and what if you're going to be in a restaurant sometime? don't you want to have a gun? maybe these died because they

were in waffle house, a gun free zone and. so part of the story was the guy who said there's going to be no regulation on your power. so that was the argument. public health did convince anyone even when we saw what it was. and so to me this is really important story for couple of reasons. but one i just want to highlight is because race and why do i say that because when you hear the story of a naked white shooter who kills black people people, think automatically of like the buffalo shooting. for example, a guy had, a manifesto, he was on a mission, kill black people or kyle rittenhouse who was drawn by the black blm protests. you know, there's a very clear racial component i've studied this shooter a lot i haven't interviewed him, but i've watched hundreds of hours of his video testimony and youtube. and he doesn't at least consciously. and this is not like he knows anybody's watching, say, one

racist thing. i don't know what's in his heart and but i don't really care. the issue is the structure so here's a mass shooting the structure here can make a decision which is these white guns came because of our gun laws and either can mobilize to make sure this doesn't happen again or we can protect the rights of like the mass shooter and what we did is we rallied and our states we elected the guy who said white men with guns, their rights shall not be infringed. so the story of race, whether or not the guy driven by racism, the of race in this book is the story of this that mobilized to make sure that the next guy who this is going to have the same rights or more in way more rights and in a way this shooter like the next mass shooter and the next mass shooter, weren't guilty of anything until the moment they pulled the trigger. right. even though, the guy was saying what they were going to do.

and so the system protected rights of a white man with air 15 even when the even when the effect of what that man could and would do was just so gratuitously obvious. want to push you on the forces pushing this liberty argument and it is that the tail wagging the dog or the dog doing the wagging here in the sense there are a lot of forces here and organized forces like the nra, for example who are obviously this narrative we'll talk about in a second about the failure to engage with this narrative and what that means. but this seems to have a lot of currency in this gun debate, in the broader debate around our election coming in, the among base of people, i think, who support donald trump. so i'm just wondering sort of whether you see this being a kind of malicious and working ized dystopia in manipulation or

whether you see this as being something fundamental to the american or what's going on, this sort of liberty argument that it seems to have such currency across such a broad range of geographies and classes, etc. well, certainly part of this is being consciously crafted. and i want to be really clear about that. if you look at pew opinion polls example in the eighties. 78% of gun owners had guns for hunting or because they were passed down in their family, very few people said, i need guns to protect myself from people who weren't like, you know, police or security already. and and so before all the apparatus changed, before the supreme court case and the 1980s, reagan stuff changed the narrative around guns. guns were to be the domain of people like police or military who protect society or criminals and so that the most people

said, i own guns for hunting that was majority. if you jump forward to 2020 like 90% of people say that they own to protect themselves from other people's and like so the whole narrative around guns has shifted as we've decayed the infrastructure that connects us, the street lights and green and public schools that keep us connected and the health care plans and all these kinds of things like all the infrastructure, all the interstitial. and so there's something about guns that have on one hand, i just wanna be really clear. it is very conscious notion of a gun is your protection. and when you feel anxiety or fear. so that's a really conscious message. and i say that because the nra has very powerfully told people and said it again at the nra convention last friday, nobody's to come take your guns. and when you see guns as your protector, the idea that

somebody is going to come take away protection is a real mobilize xr toward like for me time there's a new variant of covid early on i probably bought like 595 masks. like every time, like it was just like it was like, oh my god, a new thing. maybe my old mask is not good enough or something like that. and it was happening. i was doing the research for this book and i saw people who were not like that, crazy people on twitter who were like, my god, somebody is going to take my protection. and they would out and buy five more guns just in case. that was going to happen. and so that narrative is a provocation. it is a concern, reaction of a particular market. but it also goes in hand with the kind of decay of all other things that keep us safe or connected or things like that in society. but i mean, i saw that, you know, even in the interviews i've been doing, i did the pre-interview for show right before i came here and the interviewer kept, well, these

conservative gun owners, this a conservative gun or this. and i'm like, well, let me tell you, most the fastest growing group of gun owners are black women, right now, there are huge black gun. forming across the south. for example. and so part of the story, the nra, the nra is like an arms dealer. they to it's not like they're tied to one side. they want they one side to buy, the other side to buy. and so after the murder of george floyd for example, there was a very targeted a very targeted campaign at black and latino populations to say the police aren't going to protect. in fact, they might harm you, so you better carry a gun. and then when a of black owners started buying guns, then they went back to the white and hers and they're look, all the black people have guns. you guys buy some more guns. and so, in a way, cycle is very conscious and now my fellow, after october 7th, they l.a. -- are rushing out to get guns, you know, so this is not happening randomly. so i just want to i just want to highlight that there is a

conscious market here, but i would also say that that idea of there are all these binaries that i played with and because health is the foil of the book it's the it's the argument that's the convincing to the people should be convinced by this. and i say this as a physician and practitioner of public, but the idea that there's a gun that's going to be your tactile that's your power and that gun represents your liberty, autonomy. it's something very, very material, very community for a lot of gun owners. and so that argument really based in i mean, for people that i interview, it's the reality of i live a half hour from the cops and my gun. i'm the guy told me i'm like my own responder but for everybody. for a lot of people, it just symbolized like their power. and i would see the gop, for example, trump is great at this

playing to the story of guns represent your power and judges in particular are there to uphold your power and that was just at regulation or government databases was never going to win the argument against that so there's something about these guns represent your autonomy and your power that played to the history of i don't even think it's like frontier ship in country. i just think honestly it's the history race in this country. but, but it's just they're really good at like really it's like me with, the masks, you know, it really does feel that way. okay. so i want to we're going to get soon to questions from everybody here i have many i could ask you which means people here have many more. can i just i wrote a list of the most beautiful the questions themselves should be like the study guide or something. they were so lovely. so the but i want to come back to the public health and especially because we're sitting here at harvard, we are in you

know, we're in university central and there's a lot in this book that really lays the blame at the feet of the research community. i mean, that's a little that's a little too unfair. but as two professors, i figure we have to be little self-flagellating here. so maybe just get into this a little bit. how public health missed the boat on this. let me just put it at that. i'm a practitioner of public health. i start the book, a practitioner of public health. i still believe in gun laws. and and over five years of researching this book, i really started to question myself and my place in the narrative of there's a mass shooting. and then go on television. and i say, we need red flag laws and background checks and assault weapons and why i say that i want those things. i would love to live in a country where we had all this, where we had a different narrative around gun ownership like they do in switzerland or scotland or other places where people about guns with training

and in defense of the nation and as a communal exercise not to mistrust each other. we don't got that. and so i'll just say a things. and again, i think this is for me, it was for me the most challenging part of the book. first, there is a historic argument about public health that i'm making and so part the argument is public kind of i mean i kind of trace how public health came to the gun debate and, you know, it had been kind of going back and forth, but it kind of came to the gun debate at the time that it was high from having relative really brought big tobacco down and brought car makers and, you know, not down. it was just like, hey, you health, health and moms and government regulation and the promise of a liability lawsuit that's going to put you out of business, that's going to that's going to work with guns. so we brought same playbook in the 90 days and the early 2000s

as i show to the question of guns and of the story, i show is that guns are very different cigarets and cars. and we didn't recognize how deeply they were different. but you know you think about it with cigarets everybody had an anti had gotten lung cancer or walked into a restaurant and didn't like secondhand when they knew that it was bad for you or they knew somebody who had been in a car wreck. there was something was not north-south about that. it was not ideological in the same way. and the tobacco industry and the automotive industry were susceptible to class action lawsuits. and the gun industry was tied to 200 years of who got to carry a gun in public. this country, white men. it was really to regionalism. southern conservative income people identified more with

guns. and the other two things to know about how i'm just telling you to how this debate formed, which i think is a important part of the story, but but so already just from that framework, you can see and the other key thing is gun manufacturers are protected. you cannot sue a gun manufacturer or for if it's a product, kill somebody the way you can. if you're blender, kill somebody. and so gun manufacturers are protected. and so all these there were all these things that were different about guns and the same playbook wasn't going work, but especially that regional and racial difference, it just lay the ground and then lay on of this and this and this is i'm just telling you whole history here in 2 minutes but on top of that the there's a research that goes into place, a federal research ban and, you know, for all my professional life, it's kind of like open up the research so we can the research so we can find that. but but we didn't as the nra was doing a lot of work during the time of the ban, what effect of

the ban was was that places that doing gun research for the years of the ban were either places were in blue states that wanted to support gun research or liberals me who were tenured in in a bubble. so the people who doing the gun research were liberals and places like boston and the people who were going to impacted by the policies were proposing were these already resentful red state people. and so there's all this research show where before the ban was lifted, it was kind of like blue state public health. people were making these ideas and the red state people were supposed to follow those. and it just made it too easy for the nra to come in and say, this is big government, these liberals telling you what to do. and we just had no counter to that because we didn't see what was happening for a long time underneath the ban that's kind of the story i tell.

and so there's this whole kind of weird thing where the research ban it just it just has all these unintended consequences, which is that it sets the stage for red state americans to see guns as resistance to blue states and government and to mandates. all these things we see play out in the pandemic. they all set during really during the gun debate in a way. and we just didn't see it coming. we thought like, oh, of course, everybody's going to follow the rules. that's an oversimplification. but i think that's part of the story. and then the other part of the story is, health the health framework was an insufficient to what the nra was doing with its with its authority and red states and was our framework. let's go in and sit save lives. it's important to save lives we need to save lives. but the nra saw even the loss of life as an acceptable trade off for the power game that it was playing which was all about

ceding the judiciary i mean it was incredible how direct this was which if we controlled the courts and the judges the way up to the nra all the way upstream, we going to be able to control things much broader. we're going to be able to control speech and women's reproductive rights. so they used guns as a way to control the judiciary. and the other point i make in the book is that the health frame is not it just it doesn't you don't see what's happening if you're just at health, which is this whole power game that's happening that had to do with the power politics. and even i mean, there are all these i anybody see this? there were there was a poll and 74% of republicans said mass shootings are, an acceptable trade off to live in a free well that's the message that people have been hearing about guns for decades now and we didn't see it we thought if they just saw death they would change their mind the way they did with cigarets and.

actually, for the reasons i lay out in the book. and so it's not like i think public health is. that was what the joe asked me and i clarified and he got mad at me and cut me off. but but i don't think public health is wrong or misguided. there. incredible, dedicated people, scholars activists and volunteers. i don't think any of that stuff. but do think that there was something happening outside the public health framework. and just looking at the frame of injury and death made it harder for us to see the politics not just of judges, but of open carry, for example, of all these other things that were happening outside of our framework. and so the public health framework, i feel like, has set us behind the power game. and that's kind of the point trying to make. so i want to open up to questions. so let me i'm going to ask you a very brief last. you're going to be give me a very brief, though. this is a big chunk, the big chunk of things, which is so is not to bring public health knife

to a political gunfight. what's your top prescription for what we need to do? i'm a structuralist i argue that we need to reinvest in in structure. in the book i talk about ways to do that without governments, regulations or mandates in, ways that i think would be more convincing to red states. i think we need a bigger than the one we have. people say, oh, well 90% of people support background checks and that's maybe true, but 90% of people don't vote on whether or not they support background and they don't kick politicians out who don't. and so we need to make gun safety much more tactile, much more capitalist much more material. and so i argue for reframing can safety along the lines of what i gun safety entrepreneurs, realism and building out networks in a more structural way. okay, let's see what a moderate

yourself go ahead here in the red t-shirt, please introduce yourself and you missed you missed that this is being televised. congratulations. oh, okay. hi, i'm max. i am a resident physician at the. and i'm thrilled to be here. my is related to the health frame. i think i saw a studying public health a lot of issues in our society are there are attempts to these like sort of like social safety related issues through health care and some often argued one of the big reasons why is because we are so and i having are anti welfare state and so then we end up like bypassing structures or sort of like related mandates to solve social issues. and so then like you have like hospitals buying up housings or like hospitals having food pantries or what have you or you

know like so much social spending that's now of being done through health care and now that i think medicaid funds are to be like usable towards gun violence prevention. i was just reading something about this yesterday and i'm wondering how you think this might unfold and in this context of like using care dollars to address social issues that really should be addressed through like policy and voting and structures and what have you. yeah. well, the first and last and middle answer is that we have an election coming up 2024. maybe people have heard about it and who wins. that election has really deep and profound implications not for funding gun violence research, gun violence prevention, but for pretty much everything possible related to this issue. so so much of this depends, not just on who wins that election, but then who they put everything

you can think of from the cdc to the nih, the supreme court and all those things. and so that is really a really key part of this story, is like how do we fund social issues now for the gun siege? i was saying that i have idea of kind of gun safety, entrepreneurial ism. and so the research that i'm kind of using and again, i have no answer like this is a hard this is a hard problem i'm trying to get people first to think differently. my goal of this book is not to say, and therefore, we're going to do this thing, although, hey, if one of these things takes off and i can trademark it and get you know, no, but but i'm but it's more like i just think we need to understand how got here what the problem is a little bit better and so i'm trying to say look like as one example people like me for years called it common sense gun reform and that i interviewed all these people in the south they're like, i believe in autonomy are you saying i don't have common sense

because i don't agree with and entering my name into a government database when i buy a gun when i am buying the gun because don't trust the government in the first place. so even the frame we use is antithetical to many of the people we're trying to convince with interventions and so part of the story of the book is not so to be an interventionist, although i am in the end. now that being said, i do think that there are ways the literature that i'm looking at is that if you fix streetlights, for example, and if you have more greenspace, if you have jobs programs, if you have night basketball, gun crime down, that's not a mandate. that's and actually, there's all these ways. and so that's tried in south chicago for example tried in the worst part of the worst diverse city and i just feel like there's a lesson in that that is actually much more than we've given it credit for, which is what partners do we need to partner with maybe government,

but maybe beyond government who might want to invest in neighborhoods and communities in ways i mean, thinking of, you know, patrick sharkey's work and other people who say investing place leads to all these great economic outcomes. and so i just think we could have a lot of partners who are supermarket chains and air developers and internet providers and hiring things. in other words, like there's a kind of thing which actually would even though this is crazy, it would work really well in rural red state america. also, that kind of approach. and so the whole thought was if we can make that kind of building more tactile and commercially viable potentially for people, it be less prone to election cycle, which is what it sounds like you're kind of worried about. this. hi, my name is michael orrick. i'm a professor at university

school of law and school of public. and i your previous work, i'm excited to read the book so. i'm sorry if this is already covered in your book, the police, but i love to say as i say in the book. right. yeah but i want to suggest that you know, part of the issue is not of the limitation of public health, but sort of a how we think of public right and what qualifies and what it really is. i mean, i on a lot of people's work as well, but, you know, i go to these conferences and it's like, okay, it's great that this particular law will have a 15% reduction and whatever. but for and like, does that matter the second amendment right if this thing is struck down sorry about your work doesn't matter. right. and so and you know in the second amendment space, it's it's very individualistic. it's very, you know, an individual's right and and so one of the things that i've been trying to sort of work on is

expanding the way we think about what is gun violence, what is also, you know, what are gun measures. right. and so i think this is what you were just sort of getting at, is you know, it's not just, you know, medicaid expansion is, a gun law. right. but beyond that, i think also, you know, gerrymandering and voting restrictions and, you know, the voting, you know, election day not being, you know, paid holiday. right. those sort of things. because as you said we've had the support majorities for a lot of gun laws for a long time. but you don't have to be responsive to, those sort of things. and so one of the questions that i guess that i have, you know, if we are moved to these other spaces as you as you say, can we still you know, one of the things that i think is really important is like a shift in culture, right? the gun culture or, you know, so we're not just sort of saying we

concede, you know, 500 million guns, there's nothing we can do about it. let's work on greenspace space. you know, how do we sort of do both of those? no. and we need to do both those things and to be clear. like the hardest part for me was like dying of whiteness. such a pro public health book, like people who don't accept public health die. and that was a really easy talking. and even here, i mean, again, i was on morning joe, he said so, you're saying public health is wrong. and i'm like, well, i don't know. can we talk about that? and like, i'm gone, you know, and so because i'm not saying public health is wrong, but saying that public health the way it has been for entirely reasons, is to siloed it to address the problem that it's being charged with addressing. for the most part, this is a very broad generalization. i mean, there are people like megan rainey, for example, do incredible work about communities and structures and they're all the people we have on our structural competency initiatives. so but i'm saying in general

you're right, there's this policy, this of if we just got people to mandate red flag laws, for example, which reduce gun suicide by 9%. it's not it's much less than it's not going to stop that mass shooting. you're saying it's going to end. but but that doesn't mean the people who are we need to play along with those rules are going to do it and democrats are going to vote people out who don't mandate red flag laws, whereas republic they vote man they vote on this issue. and so if i did break it down in terms of i think the binary i'm trying to say is just thinking about the framework prevention, which is how i think. and maybe you think i think about it is like gun violence prevention. that is a liberal framework and that framework is we trying to prevent the 50,000 gun deaths a year in this country, which are

50,000 too many. but the republic other side, whoever and i don't want to say anything about people in this audience, they don't talk about it that way. you know, i'm in tennessee i've interviewed, they never talk it that way. for them, it's about power the power of holding a gun, the power of owning a gun, the power of carrying a gun anywhere went. and i interviewed all these gun owners and they said i should be able to carry a gun in the subway when i go to new york. and that's why i the bruen case and i'm like, you been to new york? and they're like, hell no, i never go to new york. but just the idea that their power was going to be restrained. so prevention, i part of what i'm trying to show people is prevention is the framework that our has put around this issue, which is important. like i want to prevent these horrible happening to these totally innocent people and families, but we're preventing 50,000 gun deaths a year. but then the other side is talking about the power ownership and they're talking.

the 500 million guns that are in circulation. so just the they're just the fraction that we're trying to talk to here. they're talking about what it means own a gun to carry a gun. prevention doesn't ever enter into their framework. and we're getting our -- kicked. i mean, it's really just straight up. anybody has read the please read the bruin at the transcript of the bruin hearing new york made totally. if health based arguments about saving lives and the nra said it's a power to carry a gun, we should be able to carry our power and like read the opinion. so health arguments are not they're not they're not stopping where we should be stopping? i mean, i might open carry to me, constitutional carry is a huge to democracy for anybody who? read my time magazine piece last week and looking at injuries and deaths is not looking the threat

of open carry to democracy. people may have seen that trump is talking about red state armies are going to come up to blue states and all this stuff. so guns are bigger than the frame of the 50,000. and so i want there to be public health. i went there to be public health. i want us to be stopping every shooting. but i want public health expertise to be collaborating with political messaging and urban planning and economics. health needs to be much more i'm saying this very broadly, much collaborative junior scholars should be able to get tenure for having ten different decibels ends on their committee and getting a grant that has ten different things. like it's not just enough publish in public health journals facing the threat to democracy that we face. and so i mean, there's really i mean, i have a gun center in nashville my colleagues and i are doing you know i have a colleague is working with shotspotter i mean incredible stuff we're stopping the 50,000 the bigger threat, the 500

million right now and. so public health needs to build out totally in it. it sounds frightening to say we need to be more political. this is my soapbox. but but we need every every public health dissertations have ten disciplines and every grant have ten different things. and and part of every paper should. well, this work in the real world. i mean, all these kind of things just to make it much more applied. because my bias i know just i just wrote the book and i'm making it up but i feel like gun safety is not tactile enough for people having gun is really tactile. gun safety is imagined for a lot of people who should be following by the rules. and my whole is how can we make it more real? and that's where i think a much broader health needs is. does that sound convincing? yeah. i mean, convincing to me and not sorry. i think part of concern i mean, i agree. right, like part of the problem is it's not going be one silver

bullet. so i don't want to take over. but so i agree. right. you need all of these different things. right. and so what rush is doing in chicago, hiring people in the neighborhood and trying to build up wealth in poor neighborhoods. right. like things like that can go towards gun violence. but i agree you need people in the gun space to say what can we work with you right in this sort of thing and just if you remember one thing just remember that the entire framework of prevention is a liberal construct. and what really all the research i did in the book shows, it's common sense if you believe in anti smoking, if you believe in wearing a mask, if you believe in in a vaccine or all these things, then that framework is common sense, but it's antithesis to the common sense of people who have a gun because they don't trust the government. you're telling them that that, that when they buy a gun. they've got to put their name in a government database that is not common sense to them.

and they're the people we're trying to get in our coalition ideally. and so it's just i just think even if we have a critical idea of just the idea of prevention, what that does who that who that includes that excludes which is just counter to the way i thought before i wrote this book. but that that's kind of what i'm trying to get at is let's think about who is in and out of this. there's a right there behind you yet, right? yeah. i get what you're saying that we basically got our, you know handed. i a defeat in strategy bad strategy the whole way i. don't know what we do next and there's multiple problems you're talking about the the waffle house type of a mass shooting versus the the shootings that happened between black boys and black men. they're very different issues they're used as a wedge, really, the same argument.

i don't know how you break through to this mean i honestly would be very reluctant to go to some of these states and feel comfortable with all that. i don't know how you feel comfortable with a gun like you feel safe. you got to have it with you all the time. nobody is all the time. i just can't get what they're getting. so i, i'm a i'm an ethnographer, right? no, no, i, i'm a guy who lives in tennessee. i'm like a jewish liberal tennessee. and there are many in nashville now. please come visit us. i play on a softball team because i have this addiction to team sports and and i'm the only non gun owner on our team, they bring guns to the game. my teammates, they're in the bat and i'm just like, just don't get it confused with the bat, you know, when you go out or something like that. but for them it's kind of common sense. like, why would i ever go anywhere without they got like for them it's just honestly the way they think and they get not

having they and i'm like you you know but then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy there actually was a shooting at one of our softball games are ready to get down on the ground and there was like oh thank god i had the gun and i'm like, yeah it didn't really help us but but i mean, nobody got we were just, you know, whatever. but, but if the divide i'm going to scare the -- out of everybody and i apologize if the divide you're talking about was a stable divide, i would actually be fine with it, which is down there. everybody has guns and up here, guns don't make any sense. but i want people to read the bruin case or the last chapter of my book. the goal not more guns in red states. red states have plenty of guns. the goal is to make places like boston and new york and, los angeles and chicago much more dangerous. because if multi-racial blue cities become, gun markets, number one, that's a whole

market. for more sales. number two, it an object lesson for the right to say, look, gun control don't work because. look, these people are all shooting themselves these terrible multi racial people. so the bruin case my book ends with the bruin case because the goal is to actually like we believed what i call the dickey divide the north-south divide the dickey research made us think that there was a divide which there is no policy longer life expectancy, shorter life expectancy. the problem is down here they're mobilizing and they're coming read the dickey read we clarence thomas's opinion the goal is the gun of places like new york. and so part of the reason i wrote the book was to say this is not just about the not understanding people down there. people are using guns to relitigate the civil war and to relitigate what they were the war of. i mean. they're using gun policy to

destabilize the north diverse cities in the north. and so for me, that's the most terrifying of my book. beside the stories of the people and. i just want people to see how much that north-south divide is, much less stable than it seems. and if especially trump wins again, it'll be even even less so. i think. well, up to you, i think we should let's stop let's say say it say it you can have it on the north. i sorry, it's so i i've lived in nashville, lived in atlanta, i lived in d.c. and i'm here now. it's something been going on. you mentioned women being the fastest growing group of gun owners and and i wonder what you think of like what's been going on in terms of media portrayal and coverage of crime in general as a contributor to what's going on and the role of sort of like public health and thinking about like i don't know, health

communication or what have you because when i, when i go home to dc, my family in the us lives now they have like five new safety mechanism arms around the house and. like what's going on? no like we like live in a suburb of dc. there's like no crime. and now our house has like multiple ways to lock the house. i'm like, what's going on, guys? there's no crime around here, but but it's like a thing or like in atlanta where i, my, my closest friends live, where my, you know, but one of my best friends owns a shotgun and, a handgun. and he is and he'll say, well there's so much crime going on. and i'm like, no, there actually isn't that much. but like the way it's covered seems to be creeping into how liberal black folks are engaging with safety ism. i'm curious what you thoughts are on this. i'm going to give you a really short answer, an insufficient answer, because we're just about of time, except to say that there so much of gun gun market

which runs on speculative threats, which is profoundly racially ized, like there's a great book, good guys with guns. angela stroud, a sociologist who went down to texas and interviewed like 100 gun owners and she say, are you here? and you're going everywhere. and they'd be like, well, i could pull up to a bodega and mr. saggy pants gag gangbanger might pull up to my car and if he's packin, i want to be packin. and she'd say, well, did that ever happen? it didn't happen. one time they actually there was not even a bodega where they live. and so so a lot of this. yeah. and so part of this is about the, the kind of fear of speculate in which guns become like, oh my god, i'm unprotected at this moment, which some people is a very real threat i mean, i'm doing a project on guns in israel right now. i'm trying to stop spread of handguns in israel, which is another insane problem.

but like there are all these stories, people who didn't have a gun when they need it. and those become like really important real life death stories, but idea of speculative threat. but the problem and is a very short answer to a very complicated and we have we have divided did this whole divide of illegal and legal guns and crime versus legal gun owners like all the public health interventions that we do background checks red, flag laws, assault weapons bans they all are they all impact quote unquote legal gun owners. and there's this divide where the crime discourse i've seen so many public of my colleagues and the people say, like, i'm afraid of crime. and they'll say, well, background checks reduce crime by 30%. but they're like, no, i'm talking the other kind of crime, you know and so there's been this split between like the crime the police do and the crime that the public health

interventions do. and i really think we need to figure out a way to bring all that back together. honestly, it was it was in the nineties. like this is this blew my mind black americans overwhelm more than white americans supported. the crime bill of 1994 the one we all hate now because there was an assault weapons ban in there and they had seen crime in their neighborhoods. and i get this is always so we actually had a rhetoric of crime that talked about crime in the nineties. and we kind of abdicated that. and so now i don't know this is long story, but i feel like we're not convincing when we talk about crime, when we try to answer that would like people who follow the rules, do background checks, stuff like that. please do come up and ask jonathan your question ends. by what we've become. it's a gorgeous book that a lot of policy spinach among a phenomenally sweet narrative that just is worth i love spinach too i'm trying to say it's a multilayered book that is just gorgeously written

phenomena, little storytelling and profound ideas. what we need to do, not just for our gun debate, but for the future of our democracy. so thank you sogood evening, ev.

thank you so much for coming to this very special you are in for an incredible treat. my